


Pandora's Gift (The I to Pi Remix)

by wei



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Mathematics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-16
Updated: 2010-05-16
Packaged: 2017-10-09 12:24:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wei/pseuds/wei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.  However mislaid.  Susan remains, also.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pandora's Gift (The I to Pi Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [littledust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littledust/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Pandora's Gift](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/813) by vnilla. 



> Thanks to hungrytiger for the beta!

_Natural _

(Finchley, 1940)  
Susan learned addition through the steady progression of time. Each day and each year, somehow made her life richer than the time before. (Not happier necessarily, but even, say, the annoyance of having a bratty younger brother made her life just that more full). When Susan's childhood dissipated into a blur of memories, this was what remained: the conviction etched in her brain that this was how things ought to be.

Growing up the first time was so natural. Spring followed winter, her tenth birthday was followed by her eleventh and then her twelfth, and it never even occurred to her that there could be a world where it was always winter. She loved her family, and they surrounded her in their love. She smiled at the world, and it smiled back. She was Susan Pevensie and never wondered about her place in the world.

\--

_Integral _

(New York City, 1942)  
Growing up the second time, Susan found herself drifting farther and farther away. Her siblings moved backward, she moved forward, and somehow at fourteen she ended up with her parents on one side of the Atlantic, while her sister and brothers were on the other.

Susan visited America because she was "no good at school work." (How could she study biology when she had ruled over talking animals and walking trees, chemistry when she had watched stone turn into flesh, and physics when she had flown on the back of a lion? And how could she study history or geography or literature when the countries and peoples of the world that were etched in her heart and mind were not in fact of this world?) However, Susan also visited America because she did not fit anymore with her siblings.

Even now though, her life made sense. Her siblings were subtracted away, but she kept her friends, and she still had her parents. Now her family was perfectly balanced, and even if Susan was on the other side of the equation from her siblings, she was still herself and part of this world.

(Bedford College, 1949)  
When Susan was twenty three the University granted her a leave of absence to let her "take care of her affairs." After a month into her leave, she already wanted it to be over. (And yet, she did not want to go back to school. At school, she could forget anything happened, since it had been months since she had talked to her parents anyway, and even longer with her siblings. But as awful as it was to realize again and again that she no longer could hope to ever bridge the divide between her siblings and herself, it would be even more awful to forget about it.) After those first few panicked days, Uncle Albert had offered to handle the estate, and Susan gladly handed the responsibility over.

There was something exhausting about sitting in her childhood room with nothing to distract her mind from spinning hysterical thoughts round and round in circles. Suddenly, everything had been taken away, and when Susan looked into what was most essential to herself, there was nothing there.

So Susan read, and Susan thought, and Susan filled the floor with scribbled-on scraps of paper. A semester later, she changed her major, and while her classmates were shocked and surprised and confused, she finally stopped caring, because somehow it felt so right, as if she had found something integral to herself that had nothing to do with those around her.  
\--

_Rational _

(University of Sheffield, 1963)  
Politics in academia was always vicious, but Susan felt that the women in her department were especially catty. She constantly overheard whispers of cosmetic surgery and sleeping her way up. (Though anyone with a rational mind would realize that if she were willing to do that, she would be more than a lecturer by now). The men were just happy she was legal and not a student, though that had its own problems.

Susan had always liked boys and lipstick. Too much perhaps, her parents had said, and Susan would have agreed with them, except that now she clung to them like a shield. It was better to be the kind of woman who desperately holds on to a spent youth than to think about how and why that was not necessary for her.

Susan loved constancy, rules, and order, but her life was still scattered into fragments. As the years went by, she found herself again and again, the last survivor in a world not her own. Beautiful penmanship, Latin, and Greek were put away unused with negotiating treaties, archery, and court dances, and Susan tried to forget she knew anything but the data and numbers that increasingly defined the present world.

\--

_Real_

(London, 2010)  
Real life, or at least Susan's life, resembled the books she read not at all. Susan's books are logical, understandable, and filled with enough symbols and jargon to not really be in English anymore, but that was in fact a comfort. In real life, however, not a week after she returned to England, Susan runs into a Handsome Stranger outside her door.

The girl was young, the same age that Susan looked, and by her accent, a stranger in a strange land. She was independent, alone, and perfectly comfortable by herself (and with herself), something that took Susan decades. Susan did not marvel at that any more - there are more things in heaven and earth, and the number of moments in even a day is uncountably infinite.

In the girl, Susan sensed a kindred spirit, and yet in what mattered most, she was unexceptional. She was a product of her age, of jet planes and women's liberation, and her friends and family were oceans away, and as unnatural as it still felt to Susan, that was an ordinary part of real life.

Once, all Susan had hoped for was to put childish things behind her. Later, she abhorred her reflection in the mirror. Now, face to face, Susan wondered if she had paused in time for the world to move around her. What was real had always been of a higher cardinality that what was natural.

The girl was not the right kind of Handsome Stranger, but Susan invited her in and kissed her anyway and moved back in step with the world.


End file.
